In Dieting, It’s Better to Have a Partner

I’m writing this, thinking about how much easier it is for me, personally, to diet and lose weight, when my husband is 100% on board with me.  The reason is that I do a lot of the cooking in the house, but we both do the grocery shopping, and it’s awfully hard to keep the cupboards free of non weight friendly items like tons of processed, starchy, sugary and fatty foods, when your partner is not on the same wavelength as you, and you find yourself staring at the fruits of his shopping endeavors, drooling and tempted to take a cookie instead of an apple, or something like that.

I find that when we’re both on board, we foster almost a friendly competition as well, and although when he is laser focused on losing weight, since he’s a man, he tends to drop the weight a lot quicker than I do (damn him!), I find it really fun when we are comparing notes on what the scale said and whether or not we worked out that day, and having that little bit of friendly competition going on, especially when I’m winning – hey  didn’t say I was always the best sport, did I!?

At any rate, it’s so easy to fall prey to the group mentality. For example, if he says “oh screw it, let’s order pizza for dinner”, I’m apt to think the same way and dismiss it as “well, if he’s willing to not lose the weight as quickly, then it’s ok if I do the same”.  I mean, after all, we’re married, and I suppose that growing heavier or thinner together is ok, but that’s not really what my mind tells me, it tells me that we should both be healthy and live as long as we can for eachother.  However, as we all know, your belly’s cravings can often win out over your mind’s power of persuasion.

However, don’t let me fool you into thinking I’m always the angel. There are plenty of times where I just don’t feel like cooking, or maybe I’ve been PMS’ing and really want McDonalds and chocolate, and so I bring that home or suggest it. And he rarely refuses me either, so there we are both setting eachother back. But when we’re on a real weightloss jag, we spur eachother on, and we don’t let the other one go when they’ve screwed up, so it’s kind of an incentive to not screw up and to lose the weight quickly, otherwise, you are kind of embarrassed at getting reprimanded about messing up and eating the wrong thing or falling off the wagon. See, marriage is good for dieting – but you both have to be on the same page with the goals!